Destination: Iraq

He was working as a second-grade teacher. Then came word that his Army Reserve unit was moving out.

Becoming Cynical

Story time had just ended in Charles Seelaus's second-grade classroom at Edward Gideon Elementary School in Philadelphia. Seelaus put down the picture book he had been showing the children, seated in a circle on a large white rug in the corner reading area. He told them he had some important news to share. This, he said, would be his last day with them. Instead of finishing out the year, he would be going to Iraq to help fight the war that had just begun.

A little boy named Stephen began to wail, setting off a small tidal wave of tears from the other children. "The school is in a 95 percent poverty area," says Seelaus, "and many of the kids come from broken homes. I had become a surrogate father to a lot of them -- and it was like Daddy was leaving. The tears just kept rolling down." Seelaus tried to reassure the children that he would write to them. He then went to the blackboard and spelled out a parting message: "You are the Best and Greatest." When a little girl pointed out that he had left out the "the" in front of "Greatest," he almost lost it himself.

Nearly 40 years old, Seelaus had only been teaching for seven months. In a major career shift, he left his job as a computer programmer to work in an inner-city school. Despite the severe pay cut, Seelaus, who spends his spare time writing children's stories on the Internet featuring "Medley Mole" and "Buddy Rabbit," knew from the first minute he stepped in a classroom that he had made the right decision. He felt born to teach. But now he was leaving. The 2-228th Aviation Regiment, the Army Reserve unit he had joined to generate extra income to support his wife and four children, had been mobilized for the first time in its history. He wondered if he'd ever see a classroom again.

Three months later, Seelaus, who'd never been away from his family more than a few days, arrived in central Iraq, 42 miles north of Baghdad. The sunset that first evening, a brilliant spectacle of orange and crimson color unlike anything he had ever witnessed, stunned him. Then, as night fell, the Milky Way appeared with pinpoint clarity in a starry sky that revealed constellations he had never seen before. "Everything was sparkling," he says, "until the mortars started coming in."

Abruptly, the night turned into chaos. With no bomb shelters constructed yet in the new camp, Seelaus dove for the ground, digging into the caked dirt that was more like solid mud than sand. Soldiers who were 1,200 yards away from him were hit. While the President had declared an end to major hostilities, the harsh reality was that the war was far from over. As Seelaus noted, "We were not in a friendly place."

They were told to trust no one. The local workers who came on the base to help paint and rebuild could easily be the same people launching attacks at night. "Some saw us as liberators, but others as an occupying force," says Seelaus, whose instinctive friendliness slowly began to erode. "You can't help it," he explains. "A situation like that just hardens you. There were explosions all the time, day and night, yet no target to shoot at. You could hear the sound of RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) and know they were close -- but by the time helicopters got there they were long gone." Rumors would spread that the white Nissan pickup trucks outside the gate were going to storm the fences with live bombs. "You don't want to get cynical," he says, "but you get cynical."

Always On Guard

In the grueling, relentless 110-degree heat, the troops set up fortifications around their camp at Balad Air Base, a former Saddam facility. They created a bomb shelter for themselves by placing a huge shipping container topped with sand bags into a vast hole that took them days to dig. The only concession to the soaring temperatures were the rolled-up sleeves of their desert camouflage uniforms. "We were always on guard," says Seelaus, "and in full battle dress at all times. We carried M-16 rifles and ammunition with us everywhere we went because we never had any idea when we would be attacked or how."

Kevlar body armor and gas masks were added when they pulled guard duty. At night, patrolling the perimeter, Seelaus no longer noticed the constellations. "I could see the mortars being fired at us and could see entire cities burning in the distance," he remembers. "Huge conflagrations burning out of control. They still burn in my brain." The soldiers were trained to fire flares at anything suspicious; they went off all the time. One night, a flare accidentally set a nearby field on fire. When the farmer and his sons ran to put out the blaze, U.S. troops killed them, thinking they were being attacked. "Tragedies like that happened," Seelaus says. "Many of them."

Fear never went away. Flying out to the desert for routine rifle-range practice in a Chinook helicopter was anything but routine. "A lot of our aircraft were getting hit -- and getting hit often -- so once you were up in the air," says Seelaus, "you were a target for anyone with weapons on the ground."

Seelaus began to pray hard. "I had no choice," he says. "I wanted to survive to see my children grow up -- and here I was where that dream could be shattered at any moment." Calls home were often traumatic. "There you are with people trying to kill you and you're away from your family who need you and depend on you ..."

When a chapel tent was set up, Seelaus became a regular at Sunday services. Raised a Roman Catholic, he had joined his wife's Mennonite church following their marriage. In Kuwait, he had also befriended a Jewish Army doctor and, now that both were in Iraq, joined him on Friday nights to celebrate Shabbat, learning words of Hebrew in the process.

Walking through the rubble of the camp one afternoon, Seelaus, who often picked up volcanic pumice stones, spotted a special one. It became his prayer stone. "I rubbed it so much that it came to look like my thumbprint was indented," he says. "That's how hard I was praying."

As the weeks slowly passed, Seelaus became increasingly aware that he was not only in a savage war zone but in the holy lands spoken of in the Bible. The Tigris River, only a mile from the camp, was one of the four rivers that flowed out of the biblical Garden of Eden. Another, the Euphrates, was many miles away. Despite the relentless violence, the camp began to take on a different face. "Here we were," says Seelaus, "in this desolate place with sandstorms and mud flying sideways. Yet we were walking the same ground that ancient people in the Bible walked on. The city of Ur was not far off. The ancient city of Babylon ..."

Baptized in Babylon

As he rubbed his prayer stone, Seelaus began to dream that he might be baptized in the Tigris River. "I was possibly about to die in these holy lands," he explains, "and it became very important to me to get that blessing." He couldn't, however, see how to bring it about. He briefly considered sneaking out of camp and baptizing himself but feared getting shot or court-martialed or both on his way to the Tigris.

Then, one steaming August night between mortar attacks, the chaplain asked for a volunteer to drive him to the helicopter pad the following weekend. He was traveling to Babylon. Seelaus's hand shot up.

When, on Saturday, it turned out that there was room for him on one of the Black Hawk helicopters making the trip, he was elated. They flew low enough across Iraq to scatter herds of cattle and sheep roaming the countryside. "Then the palaces of Babylon appeared," says Seelaus. "King Nebuchadnezzar's ancient palace and Saddam Hussein's former palace overlooking the city." On arrival, he learned that the head chaplain leading the expedition was planning to baptize another soldier in the Euphrates later that day. He asked to be included.

From the palace, the group headed through the hectic open market and down a dusty dirt road to the Euphrates. Seelaus emptied his pockets, took off his shirt, and waited. They had been warned that the ancient waters were unclean, but Seelaus was relieved to see baby fish swimming in the murky water. There was life there. When the chaplain beckoned to him, he walked confidently into the Euphrates and was baptized in Babylon. Iraq was never the same for Seelaus after that August day. "I became more patient, even a little more trustful," he says. "A lot of my fear just seemed to evaporate. The danger was the same, but I was different."

It was some months later that Seelaus found himself in another classroom. The unit communications officer was a professor at Pepperdine University. A student there had collected school bags and much-needed supplies to distribute to Iraqi schools. Seelaus volunteered to go.

Even on a goodwill mission, no advance announcement was made for fear of traps. "We were locked and loaded in full battle rattle," he says. "We were taking school supplies but watching every minute for improvised explosive devices." On arrival, the soldiers immediately jumped off the Humvees to take point around the perimeter. "The man serving us tea could have been firing rockets at night," he says. "That had not changed."

He was shocked by the schools. "There were dirt floors and broken windows and no electricity. Just rows of desks crowding the room, and bare walls." But the children were the same as the second-graders he'd left behind in Philadelphia. "One little boy looked me up and down and gave me the thumbs-up sign. These kids could have been my own students," he says, "yet here I was in full battle gear." Despite the trust-no-one edict, Seelaus saw what he needed to do. "Every impulse told me to take my helmet off -- and finally I did. I put my weapon aside and handed it to someone else. I can't love children with a weapon in my hand."

Seelaus finally returned home last spring after being deployed for 425 days. This fall, he is back teaching second grade in Philadelphia. Instead of 27 hours on tower guard duty, he's reading Arthur's Back to School Day. "It's wonderful," he says, "wonderful that I made it back." The prayer stone? He carries it every day in his pocket.